The Coming Insurrection and Assessing Anarchism
Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (1992)
Peter H. Marshall
Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction (2004)
Colin Ward
The Coming Insurrection (2007)
The Invisible Committee
Peter Marshall's Demanding the Impossible is a substantial and worthy account
of the history of anarchism, largely built around review chapters of
prominent figures and historical reviews of anarchism in action. It
takes a broad view by including writers and thinkers who might better or
equally be considered liberal or libertarian, although Marshall is
always at pains to show their differences from classical anarchist
thought.
It has to be said that it can be a little dull at times. There is also a lack of a sustained overview, something that would give us a better idea of what it all may mean. It was also written in or around 1991/2 so the 'action' (such as it is) takes place at one of the low points in anarchist history - a quarter of a century after the collapse of the student hopes of the 1960s. This affects some of the judgements when we know that anarcho-libertarian ideas of both the Left and the Right have seen something of a revival since. In other words, this should be read as an historical introduction to a tradition that ends at the high point of the Reagan-Thatcher revolution and just before the Soviet Union fully collapses rather than as a guide to current anarchist thinking.
It has to be said that it can be a little dull at times. There is also a lack of a sustained overview, something that would give us a better idea of what it all may mean. It was also written in or around 1991/2 so the 'action' (such as it is) takes place at one of the low points in anarchist history - a quarter of a century after the collapse of the student hopes of the 1960s. This affects some of the judgements when we know that anarcho-libertarian ideas of both the Left and the Right have seen something of a revival since. In other words, this should be read as an historical introduction to a tradition that ends at the high point of the Reagan-Thatcher revolution and just before the Soviet Union fully collapses rather than as a guide to current anarchist thinking.
Marshall
is writing at least a decade and probably more before the internet
permits the creation of a new politically-directed hacker activism and
the emergence of the relatively brief bout of post-2008 insurrectionism that, one suspects, would
have thoroughly confused the somewhat earnest intellectuals who
dominate his book. We will look at key text of continental insurrectionism from 2011 later in the review and there are anarcho-insurrectionist trends to be found in continental protest movements even as we write during the current 'polycrisis' (2022).
Indeed, the concentration of 'great thinkers of the past' is the problem with the tale told by Marshall - even The Coming Insurrection (see below) is the work of intellectuals rather than a description of active revolt which, as we now know, can be as much inchoate or populist in form as anarchist. Demanding the Impossible is mostly a story of intellectuals pontificating from on high about ‘shoulds’ and ‘oughts’ and about the nature of humanity and the world in a way that bears little relationship to the actual lived-in world of the people they claim that they want to liberate. And it gets worse over time. The culmination of the book is a deathly dull (I skimmed in the end) account of the thoughts of that dodgy old Hegelian Murray Bookchin, a throw-back to the nineteenth century if ever there was one.
Marshall is old-school. The succession of (mostly) dead and nearly-dead white males leaves one, ultimately, less minded to anarchism at the end than one was at the beginning, partly because of the brutal realization that, if most of these gentlemen could have achieved their utopian dreams, the rest of us would have been oppressed and miserable before very long, certainly from utter boredom in their craftsman/peasant, neighbourly, crushingly dull, little communities. At the end of the day, most of these thinkers (as opposed to the far more interesting practical seizures of power by anarchists in the Latin street) have no real language for accepting humanity as it is and so they rapidly go scuttling into a world of claimed reason where you can read petit-bourgeois tyranny on every page, at least when the people do not match up to the dreams of their saviours.
The Green Anarchism of Murray Bookchin is typical. His is a turgid and unrealistic Hegelianism that has very little to do with real freedom, calling us back to what amounts to the faith-based politics of dreamers like Kropotkin and Tolstoy via that German theoretician. Anything that is ultimately faith-based or essentialist is definitely a bit creepy to anyone with their two feet placed firmly on the earth and many anarchists can be lumped with the Marxists and New Age loons in that respect. In the end, one is thrown back to a place somewhere between the minimal state libertarianism and a humane left-libertarianism that permits some state action to enable all to be autonomous on equal terms. Grand theory has little to say to us here, praxis everything.
But even the praxis leaves us with a romantic bad taste in the mouth because every decent anarchist experiment – the Paris Commune, the Kronstadt rebellion, Makhno in the Ukraine, the POUM in Catalonia, the Evenements of ‘68 and many others – is quite simply crushed by superior reality. And these experiments can, in turn, demonstrate 'mains sales'. They are crushed not just by superior force but by the fact that the force represents something – the reality of the situation. As a romantic, I am often with all these rebellions but, let's face it, participation is heroic but futile, an act of suicide. It would be like Mishima's hari-kiri only for the goodies.
It is not enough to say that these experiments ‘should have won’ because they were ‘right’. The truth is they did not win for very good reasons related to what we are as human beings. The only successful anarchist rebellion would be one that could change humanity – and that is very dangerous territory indeed, a repetition by force of what the Bolsheviks tried and failed to do. All in all, this book, which is highly sympathetic to the movement, tells us that anarchic thinking is like a chair that is very appealing to the eye but falls apart when someone tries to sit on it. If it did not exist, it would perhaps have to be invented but only as a constraint or restraint on power, by promising rebellion if lines were crossed but not as an option for any social organization that is actually viable.
This has implications for the four main current strands of quasi-anarchic thinking in the world today – hacker activism, the green movement (which is now is in the rather disgusting position of being a shill, at least in Europe, for Russophobic, Sinophobic and and pro-NATO hysteria), the Occupy Movement and anarcho-capitalist libertarianism. All of these are troublesome for the prevailing order but none of them represent a terminal threat unless it is through the collapse of social viability through an insidious rhetorical appropriation of claims by Capital and State. Indeed, the Occupy Movement’s achievement may have been little more than mobilizing the vote for Tweedledum Obama over Tweedledee Romney and giving the State some populist welly when it is minded to bring the capitalists to heel for its own tax-raising purposes. It is interesting that the State did not even bother to do that once the political matter was settled. You compare the posturing of AOC with the intellectual integrity of Tulsi Gabbard and you can see the line between what the system can appropriate and what it cannot.
Occupy is particularly daft from a classical anarchist perspective. It is led by naïve middle class students and activists whose sole purpose seems to be to get more cash into the hands of the State from the private sector or give the NGOs a bit more oomph in the street so that money can then be diverted to their latest pet project. The general public, of course, has seen through this and bourgeous sub-insurrectionism (most recently in its BLM manifestation) played its role in triggering the populist counter-revolution and creating the conditions for an insurrectionism of the Right - as we saw in the Capitol Hill Riots. Outrage all round when the 'wrong' insurrectionists decided to play the same game.
The most threatening to the State may be hacker activism which probably explains the exceptionally vicious vendetta being employed against Julian Assange and then only because its more louche side is quite prepared to act as intellectual muscle for organized crime. But it can just as easily be co-opted into the State Department’s manipulative cyberwars against states it does not approve of and it is most effective as trail-blazer for anarcho-capitalism’s darker side. Kim Dotcom is an anarchist of sorts but not quite what Prince Pyotr Kropotkin had in mind. Liberal 'bourgeois' structures are trying with increasing difficulty to maintain not only their monopoly of force but their monopoly of narrative and the intensity of the war on Assange and Dotcom now appears to be beginning to be targeted at anarcho-libertarian billionaires like Elon Musk who offers one of the most serious threats of all - like Trump, a 'split in the ruling order'.
Even in Greece after 2008, where one would most expect insurrection, the struggle for mastery over a corrupt and failed bourgeois elite, backed by the European Union, is in the hands either of sensible Leftists who have no intention of unraveling the State and were quick to compromise with reality (much as Meloni on the Right in Italy is busy compromising with Euro-reality and the Truss Government collapsed on its own libertarian right wing fantasy in the face of the market) or a bunch of gangster fascists. In Catalonia, the drive for independence is also no longer associated with anarchist ideology but with a revived Leftism. Scotland's nationalism too is based on a pragmatic cultural leftism of a depressingly predictable type.
Worse, this Euro-Leftism is not only not anarchist in the traditional sense but is imbued with an ideology of identity politics that wholly relies on the State to impose its cultural agenda on an increasingly resentful mass (at least that proportion of the mass not on the State pay roll, admittedly a decreasing proportion). Yet, having said all that, if we winnow out perhaps seven out of ten of the anarcho-intellectuals as either faith-based essentialists (and we include the Hegelians) or narcissistic imposers of their values and personality on the world, we are left with some good people and good thinking. The American Paul Goodman stood out in this respect. And it was good to see Foucault briefly included as gad fly.
There is real value in anarchism but not as praxis or ideology. Its value lies in it being a reminder of the core value to humanity of personal autonomy and of individuation. People of anarchist bent would do much better to hold their noses and engage with the political process and the State through improved organization, if only to halt the growing power of authoritarian Leftists, fascists and religious believers. Camus' concept of rebellion as preferable to revolution holds water here - we can all constantly rebel against the unwarranted demands and claims of others.
The final pages of the book raise issues with anarchism as practical politics but by this time we have all made our mind up – either we are anarchists or we are not. I am not – more so after reading the book than before. My initial sympathies dissipated chapter by chapter as I realized that I would be filled with a terminal boredom by these men and their utopias. Anarchists are too often people who have lost their sense of reality, equally as much as the religious types they claim to despise. In some cases (horror of horrors!), they will even claim to have found a better God or reality as did Tolstoy. Any politics that has a place for invented beings and universal consciousnesses must be considered dangerous and yet a small minority of anarchists persist in this sort of flummery. Like Marxism, anarchism can be religion by other means and so deeply dangerous to non-believers in the long run. Nevertheless, this book is strongly recommended as a sound guide to what anarchists have thought in the past and what they did in history.
Indeed, the concentration of 'great thinkers of the past' is the problem with the tale told by Marshall - even The Coming Insurrection (see below) is the work of intellectuals rather than a description of active revolt which, as we now know, can be as much inchoate or populist in form as anarchist. Demanding the Impossible is mostly a story of intellectuals pontificating from on high about ‘shoulds’ and ‘oughts’ and about the nature of humanity and the world in a way that bears little relationship to the actual lived-in world of the people they claim that they want to liberate. And it gets worse over time. The culmination of the book is a deathly dull (I skimmed in the end) account of the thoughts of that dodgy old Hegelian Murray Bookchin, a throw-back to the nineteenth century if ever there was one.
Marshall is old-school. The succession of (mostly) dead and nearly-dead white males leaves one, ultimately, less minded to anarchism at the end than one was at the beginning, partly because of the brutal realization that, if most of these gentlemen could have achieved their utopian dreams, the rest of us would have been oppressed and miserable before very long, certainly from utter boredom in their craftsman/peasant, neighbourly, crushingly dull, little communities. At the end of the day, most of these thinkers (as opposed to the far more interesting practical seizures of power by anarchists in the Latin street) have no real language for accepting humanity as it is and so they rapidly go scuttling into a world of claimed reason where you can read petit-bourgeois tyranny on every page, at least when the people do not match up to the dreams of their saviours.
The Green Anarchism of Murray Bookchin is typical. His is a turgid and unrealistic Hegelianism that has very little to do with real freedom, calling us back to what amounts to the faith-based politics of dreamers like Kropotkin and Tolstoy via that German theoretician. Anything that is ultimately faith-based or essentialist is definitely a bit creepy to anyone with their two feet placed firmly on the earth and many anarchists can be lumped with the Marxists and New Age loons in that respect. In the end, one is thrown back to a place somewhere between the minimal state libertarianism and a humane left-libertarianism that permits some state action to enable all to be autonomous on equal terms. Grand theory has little to say to us here, praxis everything.
But even the praxis leaves us with a romantic bad taste in the mouth because every decent anarchist experiment – the Paris Commune, the Kronstadt rebellion, Makhno in the Ukraine, the POUM in Catalonia, the Evenements of ‘68 and many others – is quite simply crushed by superior reality. And these experiments can, in turn, demonstrate 'mains sales'. They are crushed not just by superior force but by the fact that the force represents something – the reality of the situation. As a romantic, I am often with all these rebellions but, let's face it, participation is heroic but futile, an act of suicide. It would be like Mishima's hari-kiri only for the goodies.
It is not enough to say that these experiments ‘should have won’ because they were ‘right’. The truth is they did not win for very good reasons related to what we are as human beings. The only successful anarchist rebellion would be one that could change humanity – and that is very dangerous territory indeed, a repetition by force of what the Bolsheviks tried and failed to do. All in all, this book, which is highly sympathetic to the movement, tells us that anarchic thinking is like a chair that is very appealing to the eye but falls apart when someone tries to sit on it. If it did not exist, it would perhaps have to be invented but only as a constraint or restraint on power, by promising rebellion if lines were crossed but not as an option for any social organization that is actually viable.
This has implications for the four main current strands of quasi-anarchic thinking in the world today – hacker activism, the green movement (which is now is in the rather disgusting position of being a shill, at least in Europe, for Russophobic, Sinophobic and and pro-NATO hysteria), the Occupy Movement and anarcho-capitalist libertarianism. All of these are troublesome for the prevailing order but none of them represent a terminal threat unless it is through the collapse of social viability through an insidious rhetorical appropriation of claims by Capital and State. Indeed, the Occupy Movement’s achievement may have been little more than mobilizing the vote for Tweedledum Obama over Tweedledee Romney and giving the State some populist welly when it is minded to bring the capitalists to heel for its own tax-raising purposes. It is interesting that the State did not even bother to do that once the political matter was settled. You compare the posturing of AOC with the intellectual integrity of Tulsi Gabbard and you can see the line between what the system can appropriate and what it cannot.
Occupy is particularly daft from a classical anarchist perspective. It is led by naïve middle class students and activists whose sole purpose seems to be to get more cash into the hands of the State from the private sector or give the NGOs a bit more oomph in the street so that money can then be diverted to their latest pet project. The general public, of course, has seen through this and bourgeous sub-insurrectionism (most recently in its BLM manifestation) played its role in triggering the populist counter-revolution and creating the conditions for an insurrectionism of the Right - as we saw in the Capitol Hill Riots. Outrage all round when the 'wrong' insurrectionists decided to play the same game.
The most threatening to the State may be hacker activism which probably explains the exceptionally vicious vendetta being employed against Julian Assange and then only because its more louche side is quite prepared to act as intellectual muscle for organized crime. But it can just as easily be co-opted into the State Department’s manipulative cyberwars against states it does not approve of and it is most effective as trail-blazer for anarcho-capitalism’s darker side. Kim Dotcom is an anarchist of sorts but not quite what Prince Pyotr Kropotkin had in mind. Liberal 'bourgeois' structures are trying with increasing difficulty to maintain not only their monopoly of force but their monopoly of narrative and the intensity of the war on Assange and Dotcom now appears to be beginning to be targeted at anarcho-libertarian billionaires like Elon Musk who offers one of the most serious threats of all - like Trump, a 'split in the ruling order'.
Even in Greece after 2008, where one would most expect insurrection, the struggle for mastery over a corrupt and failed bourgeois elite, backed by the European Union, is in the hands either of sensible Leftists who have no intention of unraveling the State and were quick to compromise with reality (much as Meloni on the Right in Italy is busy compromising with Euro-reality and the Truss Government collapsed on its own libertarian right wing fantasy in the face of the market) or a bunch of gangster fascists. In Catalonia, the drive for independence is also no longer associated with anarchist ideology but with a revived Leftism. Scotland's nationalism too is based on a pragmatic cultural leftism of a depressingly predictable type.
Worse, this Euro-Leftism is not only not anarchist in the traditional sense but is imbued with an ideology of identity politics that wholly relies on the State to impose its cultural agenda on an increasingly resentful mass (at least that proportion of the mass not on the State pay roll, admittedly a decreasing proportion). Yet, having said all that, if we winnow out perhaps seven out of ten of the anarcho-intellectuals as either faith-based essentialists (and we include the Hegelians) or narcissistic imposers of their values and personality on the world, we are left with some good people and good thinking. The American Paul Goodman stood out in this respect. And it was good to see Foucault briefly included as gad fly.
There is real value in anarchism but not as praxis or ideology. Its value lies in it being a reminder of the core value to humanity of personal autonomy and of individuation. People of anarchist bent would do much better to hold their noses and engage with the political process and the State through improved organization, if only to halt the growing power of authoritarian Leftists, fascists and religious believers. Camus' concept of rebellion as preferable to revolution holds water here - we can all constantly rebel against the unwarranted demands and claims of others.
The final pages of the book raise issues with anarchism as practical politics but by this time we have all made our mind up – either we are anarchists or we are not. I am not – more so after reading the book than before. My initial sympathies dissipated chapter by chapter as I realized that I would be filled with a terminal boredom by these men and their utopias. Anarchists are too often people who have lost their sense of reality, equally as much as the religious types they claim to despise. In some cases (horror of horrors!), they will even claim to have found a better God or reality as did Tolstoy. Any politics that has a place for invented beings and universal consciousnesses must be considered dangerous and yet a small minority of anarchists persist in this sort of flummery. Like Marxism, anarchism can be religion by other means and so deeply dangerous to non-believers in the long run. Nevertheless, this book is strongly recommended as a sound guide to what anarchists have thought in the past and what they did in history.
Colin Ward's Short Introduction to anarchism is a basically sound introduction to it as a political philosophy and as mode of political action but I have my criticisms. The
disappointment is that a cool analysis of an important trend in Western
political philosophy is, in the end, bent to appropriate the entire
anarchist tradition for a range of current social movements, some
appropriately (chapter eight on social and economic protest) and some
much less so (chapters nine and ten on federalist and green politics). Yes,
there is a link between the history of anarchism and, say, the green
movement but there is a bit of convenient whitewashing going on here -
fascistic thinking and technocratic dabbling have played as much of a
role in greenery as ever did philosophies of human liberation.
At the end of the day, anarchism is an act of faith in human nature (one that is hard to square with the facts of human psychology) and a general spirit of struggle against oppressive systems - capitalist and state socialist - which is where it is most fruitful. It is also an intellectual deconstruction of great abstractions like the 'nation' although it can sometimes merely replace one set of fictions with another. Ward's account of anarchism and its meanings is excellent until he gets closer to our own times. Perhaps Ward is just too 'engaged' in his subject. He is a 'veteran anarchist' himself so it is like asking Hobsbawm to write on the history of the Communist Party.
It seems to be a trend for publishers to accept books that are ostensibly objective but in fact are partially polemical (see our earlier review of What Pagans Believe) in a contemporary context. Frankly, I just find it hard to trust the assessments in the final two chapters whereas I am very happy to rely wholly on the first eight. One appreciates that this is a 'very short introduction' but Ward does a disservice to sympathetic readers in producing, towards the very end, after his considerable insights into the nineteenth and early twentieth century anarchist tradition, a rather selective account of its alleged contemporary manifestations which gently merge into what can only be described as implicit and selective policy proposals.
The sweeping aside of the American libertarian tradition in chapter seven is one concern but the adoption of federalist/regionalist and green agenda are just plain a-historical - this is a selective reading of the 'now' for subtle near-polemical ends. To appropriate anarchism for the concept of a United States (regions) of Europe (implied through a reading of Bakunin), as such a term might now be understood, is disturbingly potty, given current realities, and to believe that anarchists were necessarily going to be into green issues - maybe Nazi Minister of Agriculture Walther Darre should have been an anarchist, huh! - is just plain daft. Europeanism and environmentalism do have some anarchist elements but not nearly so much as Ward would like to claim - while his earlier attempt to 'diss' modern American economic libertarians as not mainstream anarchists may be true today but many an artisanal Proudhonist and nineteenth century opponent of Marx would have felt closer to them than to the interfering social movement protesters of today. This is the rejigging of ideological history on a grand scale.
At the end of the day, anarchism is an act of faith in human nature (one that is hard to square with the facts of human psychology) and a general spirit of struggle against oppressive systems - capitalist and state socialist - which is where it is most fruitful. It is also an intellectual deconstruction of great abstractions like the 'nation' although it can sometimes merely replace one set of fictions with another. Ward's account of anarchism and its meanings is excellent until he gets closer to our own times. Perhaps Ward is just too 'engaged' in his subject. He is a 'veteran anarchist' himself so it is like asking Hobsbawm to write on the history of the Communist Party.
It seems to be a trend for publishers to accept books that are ostensibly objective but in fact are partially polemical (see our earlier review of What Pagans Believe) in a contemporary context. Frankly, I just find it hard to trust the assessments in the final two chapters whereas I am very happy to rely wholly on the first eight. One appreciates that this is a 'very short introduction' but Ward does a disservice to sympathetic readers in producing, towards the very end, after his considerable insights into the nineteenth and early twentieth century anarchist tradition, a rather selective account of its alleged contemporary manifestations which gently merge into what can only be described as implicit and selective policy proposals.
The sweeping aside of the American libertarian tradition in chapter seven is one concern but the adoption of federalist/regionalist and green agenda are just plain a-historical - this is a selective reading of the 'now' for subtle near-polemical ends. To appropriate anarchism for the concept of a United States (regions) of Europe (implied through a reading of Bakunin), as such a term might now be understood, is disturbingly potty, given current realities, and to believe that anarchists were necessarily going to be into green issues - maybe Nazi Minister of Agriculture Walther Darre should have been an anarchist, huh! - is just plain daft. Europeanism and environmentalism do have some anarchist elements but not nearly so much as Ward would like to claim - while his earlier attempt to 'diss' modern American economic libertarians as not mainstream anarchists may be true today but many an artisanal Proudhonist and nineteenth century opponent of Marx would have felt closer to them than to the interfering social movement protesters of today. This is the rejigging of ideological history on a grand scale.
This implicit polemic is unhelpful - either the reader
deserves a considered assessment from outside a movement or an obviously
engaged history that masquerades as nothing else. The book ultimately
seems intended to persuade and not to inform. However, it is well
written and engaging, with material on the great names and events of
anarchist history that deserves to be part of any civilised person's
general knowledge. There are fuller accounts of the history of
anarchism (including Demanding the Impossible) and there are other more
powerful intellectual investigations of what anarchism means today (such as The Coming Insurrection). This short history has to be seen as a quick second division guide, a useful and
slightly frustrating half-way house, well worth reading for many of the
facts, a proper appreciation of the extra-European dimension to
anarchism and for some sensible particular judgements and insights into
contemporary alternative modes of thinking but it is not to be placed in
the first rank by any means.
On the other hand, the decade-old The Coming Insurrection is a remarkable book - the best expression of the 'rage against the machine' that had been emerging for
some time at the margins of European life but which broke out in the wake of 2008, has simmered since then and is ready to develop revolutionary potential if the incompetents at the heart of western liberal democracy fail to manage the current 'polycrisis' they have caused within the next six months or so (writing in the Autumn of 2022). It should be noted though that the text was written in 2007 before the 2008 crisis.
This is an intellectual version of a rage that is usually focused on direct action. The bulk of the book appears, despite its claims to come from 'The Invisible Committee', to be drafted primarily by one highly creative and rather witty voice but the impulse here is precisely that fuelled riots in Athens on the one side and the laying of flowers at the home of attempted cop-killer Raoul Moat in Newcastle on the other by street sympathisers of organised crime on the other. The Moat business confused as much as it horrified Middle England but it represented the alienation of many people who have no economic stake or position of respect within the global economy and yet are housed within its faltering motor, the Western capitalist democracies.The intellectuals, artists and students move to street protests and occupations (now represented by the childish antics of Just Stop Oil) but the people 'out there', more placid under normal conditions, may be pushed into insurrectionism that takes on populist rather than traditionally 'left' characteristics. What is intriguing about the Invisible Committee is that it was written by an intellectual or intellectuals who seem to want to straddle all the worlds of potential protest with a workable theory of insurrection against a failing system - beyond the infantile leftism once attacked by Lenin.
This is an intellectual version of a rage that is usually focused on direct action. The bulk of the book appears, despite its claims to come from 'The Invisible Committee', to be drafted primarily by one highly creative and rather witty voice but the impulse here is precisely that fuelled riots in Athens on the one side and the laying of flowers at the home of attempted cop-killer Raoul Moat in Newcastle on the other by street sympathisers of organised crime on the other. The Moat business confused as much as it horrified Middle England but it represented the alienation of many people who have no economic stake or position of respect within the global economy and yet are housed within its faltering motor, the Western capitalist democracies.The intellectuals, artists and students move to street protests and occupations (now represented by the childish antics of Just Stop Oil) but the people 'out there', more placid under normal conditions, may be pushed into insurrectionism that takes on populist rather than traditionally 'left' characteristics. What is intriguing about the Invisible Committee is that it was written by an intellectual or intellectuals who seem to want to straddle all the worlds of potential protest with a workable theory of insurrection against a failing system - beyond the infantile leftism once attacked by Lenin.
Post-2008 a mobilisation for a war of sorts was slowly gathering pace between marginalised peoples and the authorities. The latter would normally have mobilised the authoritarian petit-bourgeoisie just as the former seemedo be learning how to connect and to co-ordinate outside the surveillance systems of a police force that is no longer theirs but often represents, through no fault of its own, the characteristics of an occupying power. In fact, the classic 'petit-bourgeoisie' is as disenchanted as the marginalised because they too are becoming marginalised culturally as much as economically and, since this book, COVID and the self-inflicted wounds of the current energy crisis have hit both marginalised and petit-bourgeoisie with similar force so that it becomes hard (and Truss tried it and failed) to set one class against the other because the resources available to do so are crumbling.Indeed, the solution to the crisis of 2008, which was to buy off dissent with cheap money that had the late liberal capitalist economy chugging along on cheap money and mounting low interest debt, seems merely to have deferred the crisis to today as rampant inflation forces up interest rates, pushing more and more in both working and small business classes into marginalisation as the State begins to lose the ability to keep throwing money at its political problems.
France, as so
often, was and is a central cockpit for this struggle. This book contains many
allusions, not always fully explained, to clashes between the police and
the disaffected, mostly in the suburbs of the big cities, that began
even before the 2008 economic crisis and are clearly not fully or
fairly reported to the rest of the world. Indeed, our mainstream media is extremely adroit at not reporting dissent from below until it is too late to understand it fully - whether it be the collapse of law and order in Sweden that put the pariah Swedish Democrats into a position of power or the migration 'invasions' (for that is what they are) or growing pro-peace demonstrations emerging across Europe. This was a France iwhere
the shine had long since come off its President Sarkozy and whose own
response to the slow motion breakdown of law and order was to mimic his
neighbour, Silvio Berlusconi, by shifting to the populist Right as the
middle classes got increasingly frightened.
At one point, we saw the entire French political class uniting around a ban
on the burqa in a way that puzzled freedom-loving Anglo-Saxons in its intensity.
On top of this, we saw an assault on the Roma which mimicked a
similar attack the previous year in Italy. The contexts were never discussed just as it has taken months (years) now for the elite information structures to investigate human trafficking operations and organised crime operations that link the UK, Albania, Kurdistan and Afghanistan and it took years to have a debate over tolerated ethnic-origin child abuse in the North of England. Wherever we look, narratives are breaking down as the truth of things leaches out despite the best efforts of the existing structures whose first reaction is to try and suppress any narrative that does not accord with ruling ideology. The level of economic suffering that the romantic pro-Kiev posturing of Western political elites is causing is only now breaking through into the world-view of the well-heeled.
The trajectory of unreported and intensive surveillance and policing of the French suburbs in the post-2008 environment was also clear - do not allow these areas to become the source of Athens-style riots or, worse, the basis for the rise of anarcho-communist no-go areas like those of Hezbollah in Beirut or Hamas in Gaza.This is a struggle that, even today, is still being fought out on the margins of society rather than at the centre but the marginalisation of more and more people within late liberal capitalism and the blind addition of more marginal people through mass migration suggests the potential for the breach of the social dam . Resistance also had its 'respectable' counterpart in the war over mass information, epitomised by Wikileaks' publication of secret US Government documentation and Iceland's remarkable decision at that time to make itself what amounts to an anti-capitalist safe haven.
In this context, The Coming Insurrection is a key text because it brings a nihilistic intelligentsia into direct contact with the marginalised through a theory (not specifically outlined in the text but on every page) of direct action. This first arose on the radical racist Right but has migrated across to the anarcho-communist Left almost seamlessly. This is the theory of 'leaderless resistance' and it is causing anxiety to the established Governments of the capitalist and semi-democratic West.
The trajectory of unreported and intensive surveillance and policing of the French suburbs in the post-2008 environment was also clear - do not allow these areas to become the source of Athens-style riots or, worse, the basis for the rise of anarcho-communist no-go areas like those of Hezbollah in Beirut or Hamas in Gaza.This is a struggle that, even today, is still being fought out on the margins of society rather than at the centre but the marginalisation of more and more people within late liberal capitalism and the blind addition of more marginal people through mass migration suggests the potential for the breach of the social dam . Resistance also had its 'respectable' counterpart in the war over mass information, epitomised by Wikileaks' publication of secret US Government documentation and Iceland's remarkable decision at that time to make itself what amounts to an anti-capitalist safe haven.
In this context, The Coming Insurrection is a key text because it brings a nihilistic intelligentsia into direct contact with the marginalised through a theory (not specifically outlined in the text but on every page) of direct action. This first arose on the radical racist Right but has migrated across to the anarcho-communist Left almost seamlessly. This is the theory of 'leaderless resistance' and it is causing anxiety to the established Governments of the capitalist and semi-democratic West.
My own assessment is that neither side can win in this war.
The organisational resources and, as demonstrated both by the German
State in the 1970s and by the Israeli State today, ruthlessness of the
authorities will ultimately strip away every vestige of liberty, if
deemed necessary, from the general population. States will use
every possible trick of cultural manipulation in order to contain,
criminalise and break the spirit of the rebels. The general direction of
history would, in this respect, be like that of the Tsarist authorities
in dealing with the Narodniks - a cycle of repression and terrorism that
ends up with a defeat for both anarchism and the State.
Just as with the Tsarism, if there is not some restraining liberal influence (which, fortunately, we believe is the case), the process of breaking the back of revolt not merely degrades the ethical claims of the State (which are pretty dodgy anyway) but raises the sense of something being profoundly wrong amongst sufficient sections of a powerless middle class that a certain sympathy will emerge for the marginalised, even at their most brutal. A refusal to judge and, in some quarters, a shift into the marginalised camp offer unknown threats and consequences to the existing system. The problem is one of money and modernisation. The resources of the State are much greater than that of the rebels but are still limited (and are now becoming more limited because of the tension between fiscal irresponsibility and global central bank concern with controlling inflation). The necessity to strut on the world stage and get a share of world trade conflicts with the necessity for investment in the marginalised zones along local, regional and national lines. This is the true internal contradiction within late liberal capitalism.
What 'leaderless resistance' does is give permission for anti-social behaviour to become political action against a system with, as this book makes clear, the aim of seizing territory through communal action. The destruction of the tools of the existing system is undertaken through actions that are so random and 'unled' that the authorities have no specific place to clamp down and so must commit to arbitrary action and injustice to make progress. It is deliberately provocative. As for the book itself, published in 2007, it was apparently the prime piece of evidence in a somewhat dodgy anti-terrorism trial of nine persons in France in 2008, and is now freely available in translation, distributed by no less than the MIT Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in an act that, like the widespread publication of the Unabomber Manifesto in its time, indicates that the 'safety valve' of freedom of speech in the Anglo-Saxon world still continues to operate.
The introduction can be skipped. It is different in style and content and lacks the literary panache of the rest of the book. The bulk of the book is a witty and coruscating analysis of modern Western culture that, bluntly, is just about right. On about every page, the nihilistic author peels away the magic and the illusions and the delusions of late capitalism with a 'bon mot', a 'mot juste', a phrase that might come to be in book of quotations. Read these chapters and you may be horrified but also enlightened or you may simply throw the book away in disgust as a devout Christian might throw away Lavey's 'Satanic Bible'.
The problem with the book is the obvious one - where does it take us in practice?. Its analysis of what is wrong with contemporary culture may be nihilist but it is depressingly accurate. Again, it reminds one of the analyses by the Russian Nihilists of the combination of comic opera and brutality that was Tsarist Russia. But the book falters in the last fifth when it tries to turn this analysis into a plan of action, a plan that does not have anything of the organisational 'nous' of the Catalonian Anarchists or, say, the Zapatistas. Certainly, the authors of this text are doing that traditional French thing of revelling in their own intellectual abilities and command of language - these are people who have read their Foucault - but there is no sign that they actually understand the workings of power. Nor do they appear to have learned anything from history or show any sign that they could match the ability of the Zapatistas or even Hamas to manage the instruments of late capitalism, such as the media, to survive, prosper and serve their communities.
The 'Invisible Committee's' policies of direct action are not only self indulgent at the ultimate expense of the marginalised but self-defeating. As Wikileaks has shown, the anarcho-libertarians who play the internet in an informational war that engages the middle classes and then splits them are forcing radical changes in state action that reduce their ability to undertake brutal and oppressive actions but which simply shift the battle ground to surveillance, social atomisation and psychological manipulation. Their only hope is in a breakdown of the financial sinews that hold the State together and, though these are currently severely strained outside the US, they do not look like they will snap any time soon. The State can still always find the resources to put a gun to the neck of its citizens if push comes tp shove.
The anarcho-communists behind this text are simply seeking a self-immolation that will destroy the very tools that they use against the system. The inheritors of their strategy are not likely to be libertarians at all but the same sort of revolutionary authoritarians that emerged in Russia in the wake of the collapse in 1917. In fact, for all the talk of 'internal contradictions' amongst Marxists (foes of the anarcho-communists), capitalist democracy remains exceptionally adaptable and fluid. The sort of war that allowed communism to emerge is unlikely (although events in Ukraine suggest now that it is not impossible) and, if it did take place, Russia, even China and India, might implode from the collapse of global trading structures long before the United States. So long as the US stands 'free' (whatever that may mean), liberal capitalism, even if socialised to a degree, has its stronghold ands European liberal elites can call on Washington as the Christian Democrats could in the late 1940s in Italy and Germany.
But this book remains a highly recommended text because even if the authorities do not understand that the rage against the machine is real and justified, they will eventually be doomed to irrelevance. Technological and associated cultural changes are making authoritarian solutions more difficult to sustain in the long run. Instead of provoking authority into tyranny, the anarcho-communist are likely to exhaust authority into coming to terms with liberty so, in that sense, they may be doing us all a service. The real threat to the centrist superstructure does not lie in inchoate and ultimately easily survivable popular protest but in billionaire libertarians like Trump and possibly Musk and Thiel deciding to take the part of the people like latter day Gracchi Brothers.
The Invisible Committee's 'leaderless communal resistance' will not transform the West into what appears (when you analyse it) to be some strange quasi-agrarian but urbanised collaborative and sustainable community of equals (which really means warlordism and anarchy in the popular sense when organised crime, the quintessential Albanian gang, takes hold). Their actions will merely prolong the agony by giving an excuse for repression that cannot be sustained - an alternative 'bourgeois' libertarian resistance is emerging at multiple levels to the presumptions of State, religious and cultural authority in any case and is becoming embodied in populist movements which are paradoxically less authoritarian in ideology than their centrist and left-liberal opponents.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book is the central section that goes into a direct attack not merely on the 'progressive' trend (clearly exploited by authority in its foreign policy) but the popular environmentalist movement. The 'Invisible Committee' (perhaps with a dash of paranoia but also with some justice) sees this as the creature of the next stage of capitalist enslavement, the means of making us all willing workers in dismantling a failed system in order to build one that will be more effective in its control of us. There is considerable merit in this idea which works against the grain of the growing identification of environmentalism and anarchism, certainly in the Anglo-Saxon world (see Ward's Short Introduction reviewed above). The ecological industries do seem to be built on a framework of increased regulation and centralisation of power and there is no doubt that the European Union as a project has seized control of environmentalism, following German state priorities, in order to enhance its power against nation states.
Meanwhile, the surveillance and tracking systems that late capitalism clearly considers absolutely essential to managing the movement of goods and services cost-effectively seem to cross-link with ease to the tracking of persons required by the security structures of the state and thence to the monitoring of personal use of energy and of individual's waste management. These structures seem to be incompetent at dealing with mass migration (because there is no political will in that respect) but they may not be incompetent in tracking anyone who uses the monetary structures of the capitalist system as the Canadians demonstrated in their war on the truckers. The environmentalist movement provided the security structures and capitalism with a far more effective ideological buttress for its actions in Europe than security - the reverse of the case in North America - and has now merged environmental and security priorities in a new shared collaboration between elites and Greens in the debate over 'energy security' (a problem created by both in the first place).
But whether eco-obsession or fear of terrorism, the constructed mythologies of both (added to by paranoid Russo- and Sino-phobia), reaching to almost religious proportions amongst the less intelligent in both territories, converge in the creation of massive infrastructures for individual surveillance and management across the West as a whole that are not so very different from those that might have been employed in a more technologically advanced Soviet Empire or are being employed in China. As the Invisible Committee puts it: "The new green asceticism is precisely the self control that is required of us all in order to negotiate a rescue operation where the system has taken itself hostage. Henceforth it is all in the name of environmentalism that we must all tighten our belts, just as we did yesterday in the name of the economy." To be crude, this is effectively saying that we are like people who have been persuaded to organise the cattle trucks to take us to the camps and so save the authorities the trouble. There is merit in this argument since the ability of states to manage culture and opinion has advanced a great deal over the last thirty or so years.
There is another aspect of the book that surprises. It is ostensibly of the 'Left'. Anarchism is traditionally of the Left and its enemy is the State but the most coruscating attacks are not only on the progressive and environmentalist movements but on the official organised trades union-based Left. The assumption is that fascism (linked to the State) is the enemy but the ideology behind the book has oddly traditionalist and conservative aspects. There is a belief in place and personal association (only an edge off tribalism), a surprising and not clearly explained rant against cultural relativism and an end-game that may be similar to Marx's withering away of the state but could equally be a post-modern version of the agrarianism and small tribe mentality of the followers of former Leftist and now Right theoretician, Alain de Benoist. Indeed, since there is no real provenance for the authors, we have to be highly suspicious that the author merges his Foucault with some understanding of De Benoist to create something that is not so much beyond Right and Left as subversively New New Right from the perspective of any establishment Socialist who is in collaborative alliance with the new eco-capitalism.
This is part of a much wider trans-valuation of values in Europe. Official Socialists and the anti-Islamist universalist Rightists merge their aspirations with the security State while both the radical Right and the anarcho-Left move into the position of street resistance and localism. The difference is that the Left (including the Invisible Committee) have no place for racial or ethnic questions of difference or any radical differentiation between gender roles. The Invisible Committee clearly supports the rights of migrants (which is where we disagree with its analysis because we see mass migration as part of the process deliberately marginalising increasing parts of the citizen-population although this has nothing necessarily to do with race or ethnicity) and has no sense of nationality in the way that it has traditionally been used to buttress the State (where we also disagree because the democratic nation-state, as opposed to the liberal nation state, remains the best organisational structure for ensuring social cohesion and limiting 'marginalisation').
Nevertheless, its ideology of place and personal association, as well as of direct action and of violence, is not a million miles from those less hidebound and more intelligent European Rightists with a critique of modern capitalism and a sympathy for traditionalism that extends to respect for, say, Islam and so for Hamas and Hezbollah. This is a tension and internal contradiction within the 'resistance' (or insurgency) that has yet to work its way through the 'system'. The balance of 'leaderless resistance' protest is different in different countries - from Athens and the Latin world (where it is quite definitely on the Left) to the Anglo Saxon community (where it tends to the quasi-racist Right or Greens). But the real reason to read this book is for its literary merit, often for its wit. It is my belief that it will be an underground classic that will be seen as having, albeit in extreme terms, captured the mood of a time. It may inspire an 'attitude' of resistance to authority that, in very many small ways, may ultimately and positively bring the authorities to heel and into alignment with the general mass of people's expectation that they should serve its interest and not the institutional interests of politicians, lobbyists, corporations, bankers, unions and churches.
So here is a taster of the mood of the moment, as applicable to the marginalised of the Anglo Saxon world as that of France ...
Just as with the Tsarism, if there is not some restraining liberal influence (which, fortunately, we believe is the case), the process of breaking the back of revolt not merely degrades the ethical claims of the State (which are pretty dodgy anyway) but raises the sense of something being profoundly wrong amongst sufficient sections of a powerless middle class that a certain sympathy will emerge for the marginalised, even at their most brutal. A refusal to judge and, in some quarters, a shift into the marginalised camp offer unknown threats and consequences to the existing system. The problem is one of money and modernisation. The resources of the State are much greater than that of the rebels but are still limited (and are now becoming more limited because of the tension between fiscal irresponsibility and global central bank concern with controlling inflation). The necessity to strut on the world stage and get a share of world trade conflicts with the necessity for investment in the marginalised zones along local, regional and national lines. This is the true internal contradiction within late liberal capitalism.
What 'leaderless resistance' does is give permission for anti-social behaviour to become political action against a system with, as this book makes clear, the aim of seizing territory through communal action. The destruction of the tools of the existing system is undertaken through actions that are so random and 'unled' that the authorities have no specific place to clamp down and so must commit to arbitrary action and injustice to make progress. It is deliberately provocative. As for the book itself, published in 2007, it was apparently the prime piece of evidence in a somewhat dodgy anti-terrorism trial of nine persons in France in 2008, and is now freely available in translation, distributed by no less than the MIT Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in an act that, like the widespread publication of the Unabomber Manifesto in its time, indicates that the 'safety valve' of freedom of speech in the Anglo-Saxon world still continues to operate.
The introduction can be skipped. It is different in style and content and lacks the literary panache of the rest of the book. The bulk of the book is a witty and coruscating analysis of modern Western culture that, bluntly, is just about right. On about every page, the nihilistic author peels away the magic and the illusions and the delusions of late capitalism with a 'bon mot', a 'mot juste', a phrase that might come to be in book of quotations. Read these chapters and you may be horrified but also enlightened or you may simply throw the book away in disgust as a devout Christian might throw away Lavey's 'Satanic Bible'.
The problem with the book is the obvious one - where does it take us in practice?. Its analysis of what is wrong with contemporary culture may be nihilist but it is depressingly accurate. Again, it reminds one of the analyses by the Russian Nihilists of the combination of comic opera and brutality that was Tsarist Russia. But the book falters in the last fifth when it tries to turn this analysis into a plan of action, a plan that does not have anything of the organisational 'nous' of the Catalonian Anarchists or, say, the Zapatistas. Certainly, the authors of this text are doing that traditional French thing of revelling in their own intellectual abilities and command of language - these are people who have read their Foucault - but there is no sign that they actually understand the workings of power. Nor do they appear to have learned anything from history or show any sign that they could match the ability of the Zapatistas or even Hamas to manage the instruments of late capitalism, such as the media, to survive, prosper and serve their communities.
The 'Invisible Committee's' policies of direct action are not only self indulgent at the ultimate expense of the marginalised but self-defeating. As Wikileaks has shown, the anarcho-libertarians who play the internet in an informational war that engages the middle classes and then splits them are forcing radical changes in state action that reduce their ability to undertake brutal and oppressive actions but which simply shift the battle ground to surveillance, social atomisation and psychological manipulation. Their only hope is in a breakdown of the financial sinews that hold the State together and, though these are currently severely strained outside the US, they do not look like they will snap any time soon. The State can still always find the resources to put a gun to the neck of its citizens if push comes tp shove.
The anarcho-communists behind this text are simply seeking a self-immolation that will destroy the very tools that they use against the system. The inheritors of their strategy are not likely to be libertarians at all but the same sort of revolutionary authoritarians that emerged in Russia in the wake of the collapse in 1917. In fact, for all the talk of 'internal contradictions' amongst Marxists (foes of the anarcho-communists), capitalist democracy remains exceptionally adaptable and fluid. The sort of war that allowed communism to emerge is unlikely (although events in Ukraine suggest now that it is not impossible) and, if it did take place, Russia, even China and India, might implode from the collapse of global trading structures long before the United States. So long as the US stands 'free' (whatever that may mean), liberal capitalism, even if socialised to a degree, has its stronghold ands European liberal elites can call on Washington as the Christian Democrats could in the late 1940s in Italy and Germany.
But this book remains a highly recommended text because even if the authorities do not understand that the rage against the machine is real and justified, they will eventually be doomed to irrelevance. Technological and associated cultural changes are making authoritarian solutions more difficult to sustain in the long run. Instead of provoking authority into tyranny, the anarcho-communist are likely to exhaust authority into coming to terms with liberty so, in that sense, they may be doing us all a service. The real threat to the centrist superstructure does not lie in inchoate and ultimately easily survivable popular protest but in billionaire libertarians like Trump and possibly Musk and Thiel deciding to take the part of the people like latter day Gracchi Brothers.
The Invisible Committee's 'leaderless communal resistance' will not transform the West into what appears (when you analyse it) to be some strange quasi-agrarian but urbanised collaborative and sustainable community of equals (which really means warlordism and anarchy in the popular sense when organised crime, the quintessential Albanian gang, takes hold). Their actions will merely prolong the agony by giving an excuse for repression that cannot be sustained - an alternative 'bourgeois' libertarian resistance is emerging at multiple levels to the presumptions of State, religious and cultural authority in any case and is becoming embodied in populist movements which are paradoxically less authoritarian in ideology than their centrist and left-liberal opponents.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book is the central section that goes into a direct attack not merely on the 'progressive' trend (clearly exploited by authority in its foreign policy) but the popular environmentalist movement. The 'Invisible Committee' (perhaps with a dash of paranoia but also with some justice) sees this as the creature of the next stage of capitalist enslavement, the means of making us all willing workers in dismantling a failed system in order to build one that will be more effective in its control of us. There is considerable merit in this idea which works against the grain of the growing identification of environmentalism and anarchism, certainly in the Anglo-Saxon world (see Ward's Short Introduction reviewed above). The ecological industries do seem to be built on a framework of increased regulation and centralisation of power and there is no doubt that the European Union as a project has seized control of environmentalism, following German state priorities, in order to enhance its power against nation states.
Meanwhile, the surveillance and tracking systems that late capitalism clearly considers absolutely essential to managing the movement of goods and services cost-effectively seem to cross-link with ease to the tracking of persons required by the security structures of the state and thence to the monitoring of personal use of energy and of individual's waste management. These structures seem to be incompetent at dealing with mass migration (because there is no political will in that respect) but they may not be incompetent in tracking anyone who uses the monetary structures of the capitalist system as the Canadians demonstrated in their war on the truckers. The environmentalist movement provided the security structures and capitalism with a far more effective ideological buttress for its actions in Europe than security - the reverse of the case in North America - and has now merged environmental and security priorities in a new shared collaboration between elites and Greens in the debate over 'energy security' (a problem created by both in the first place).
But whether eco-obsession or fear of terrorism, the constructed mythologies of both (added to by paranoid Russo- and Sino-phobia), reaching to almost religious proportions amongst the less intelligent in both territories, converge in the creation of massive infrastructures for individual surveillance and management across the West as a whole that are not so very different from those that might have been employed in a more technologically advanced Soviet Empire or are being employed in China. As the Invisible Committee puts it: "The new green asceticism is precisely the self control that is required of us all in order to negotiate a rescue operation where the system has taken itself hostage. Henceforth it is all in the name of environmentalism that we must all tighten our belts, just as we did yesterday in the name of the economy." To be crude, this is effectively saying that we are like people who have been persuaded to organise the cattle trucks to take us to the camps and so save the authorities the trouble. There is merit in this argument since the ability of states to manage culture and opinion has advanced a great deal over the last thirty or so years.
There is another aspect of the book that surprises. It is ostensibly of the 'Left'. Anarchism is traditionally of the Left and its enemy is the State but the most coruscating attacks are not only on the progressive and environmentalist movements but on the official organised trades union-based Left. The assumption is that fascism (linked to the State) is the enemy but the ideology behind the book has oddly traditionalist and conservative aspects. There is a belief in place and personal association (only an edge off tribalism), a surprising and not clearly explained rant against cultural relativism and an end-game that may be similar to Marx's withering away of the state but could equally be a post-modern version of the agrarianism and small tribe mentality of the followers of former Leftist and now Right theoretician, Alain de Benoist. Indeed, since there is no real provenance for the authors, we have to be highly suspicious that the author merges his Foucault with some understanding of De Benoist to create something that is not so much beyond Right and Left as subversively New New Right from the perspective of any establishment Socialist who is in collaborative alliance with the new eco-capitalism.
This is part of a much wider trans-valuation of values in Europe. Official Socialists and the anti-Islamist universalist Rightists merge their aspirations with the security State while both the radical Right and the anarcho-Left move into the position of street resistance and localism. The difference is that the Left (including the Invisible Committee) have no place for racial or ethnic questions of difference or any radical differentiation between gender roles. The Invisible Committee clearly supports the rights of migrants (which is where we disagree with its analysis because we see mass migration as part of the process deliberately marginalising increasing parts of the citizen-population although this has nothing necessarily to do with race or ethnicity) and has no sense of nationality in the way that it has traditionally been used to buttress the State (where we also disagree because the democratic nation-state, as opposed to the liberal nation state, remains the best organisational structure for ensuring social cohesion and limiting 'marginalisation').
Nevertheless, its ideology of place and personal association, as well as of direct action and of violence, is not a million miles from those less hidebound and more intelligent European Rightists with a critique of modern capitalism and a sympathy for traditionalism that extends to respect for, say, Islam and so for Hamas and Hezbollah. This is a tension and internal contradiction within the 'resistance' (or insurgency) that has yet to work its way through the 'system'. The balance of 'leaderless resistance' protest is different in different countries - from Athens and the Latin world (where it is quite definitely on the Left) to the Anglo Saxon community (where it tends to the quasi-racist Right or Greens). But the real reason to read this book is for its literary merit, often for its wit. It is my belief that it will be an underground classic that will be seen as having, albeit in extreme terms, captured the mood of a time. It may inspire an 'attitude' of resistance to authority that, in very many small ways, may ultimately and positively bring the authorities to heel and into alignment with the general mass of people's expectation that they should serve its interest and not the institutional interests of politicians, lobbyists, corporations, bankers, unions and churches.
So here is a taster of the mood of the moment, as applicable to the marginalised of the Anglo Saxon world as that of France ...
" From Left to Right,it's the same nothingness striking the pose of an emperor or saviour, the same sales assistants adjusting their discourse, according to the findings of the latest surveys. ... In its very silence, the populace seems infinitely more mature than all these puppets bickering amongst themselves about how to govern it."So there we have it ... a political analysis that both seems too close to the nihilism of Ligotti and Houllebecq to make us feel comfortable and yet contains some disturbing truths nevertheless.
" The weak, depressed, self-critical, virtual self is essentially that endlessly adaptable subject required by the ceaseless innovation of production, the accelerated obsolescence of technologies, the constant overturning of social norms, and generalised flexibility. It is, at the same time the most voracious consumer, and paradoxically, the most productive self, the one that will most eagerly and energetically throw itself into the slightest project, only to return later to its original larval state."
" We have arrived at a point of privation where the only way to feel French is to curse the immigrants and those who are more visibly foreign. In this country, the immigrants assume a curious position of sovereignty: if they weren't here, the French might stop existing."
" The aura that surrounds Mesrine has less to do with his uprightness and his audacity than with the fact that he took it upon himself to enact vengeance on what we should all avenge .... the open hostility of certain gangs only expresses, in a slightly less muffled way, the poisonous atmosphere, the rotten spirit, the desire for a salvational destruction by which the country is consumed."
" The couple is like the the final stage of the great social debacle. It's the oasis in the middle of the social desert ... the utopia of autism-for-two."
" ... we don't work anymore: we do our time. Business is not a place where we exist, it's a place we pass through. We aren't cynical, we are just unwilling to be deceived ... The horror of work is less in the work itself than in the methodical ravaging, for centuries, of all that isn't work: the familarities of one's neighbourhood and trade, of one's village, of struggle, of kinship, our attachment to places, to beings, to the seasons, to ways of doing and speaking."
" The metropolis is a terrain of constant low-intensity conflict, in which the taking of Basra, Mogadishu, or Nablus mark points of culmination. ... The battles conducted by the great powers resemble a kind of never-ending police campaign in the black holes of the metropolis ... The police and the army are evolving in parallel and in lock-step."
" We have to see that the economy is not 'in' crisis, the economy is itself the crisis ... The brutal activity of power today consists both in administering this ruin while at the same time establishing the framework for a 'new economy'"
" There is no 'environmental catastrophe'. The catastrophe is the environment itself. ... they hired our parents to destroy this world, and now they'd like to put is to work rebuilding it, and - to add insult to injury - at a profit. The morbid excitement that animates journalists and advertisers these days as they report each new proof of global warming reveals the steely smile of the new green capitalism ... "
" Tracking, transparency, certification, eco-taxes, environmental excellence, and the policing of water, all give us an idea of the coming state of ecological emergency. Everything is permitted to a power structure that bases its authority in Nature, in health and in well-being."
" A civilisation is not an abstraction hovering over life. It is what rules, takes possession of, colonises the most banal, personal, daily existence ... The French state is the very texture of French subjectivities, the form assumed by the centuries-old castration of its subjects ... In France. literature is the prescribed space for the amusement of the castrated. It is the formal freedom conceded to those who cannot accomodate themselves to the nothingness of their real freedom."
" There is no 'clash of civilisations'. There is a clinically dead civilisation kept alive by all sorts of life-support systems that spread a peculiar plague into the planet's atmosphere."